Two conservative outlets spend the week reviving old quotes from two progressive candidates.

As it ran on the front

You ever notice how the quote finds you right before the election, never after? Two stories, same week: a state legislator's two-year-old remark about Christians gets run through the Washington Examiner grinder under a headline that already tells you the verdict - 'won't win Texas' - like the piece is a weather report and not, you know, the weather machine. And down in Michigan, a gubernatorial candidate is made to stand up and apologize, again, for something he said in the raw grief of a synagogue attack, because the New York Post decided this was the week for that particular sentence to matter.

Here's the con, and it's not complicated: opposition research isn't illegal, isn't even new, it's the oldest tool in the shed. What's notable is the selectivity. Every politician in this country has said something in an unguarded moment that reads terrible stripped of the room it was said in. The question a paper answers, whether it means to or not, is: whose unguarded moment gets the headline, and whose gets the pass. This week, two progressive candidates got the headline. Nobody's asking the outlets running these pieces to publish nothing - dig up the quotes, that's the job. Just notice which quotes get dug.…